GETTYIMAGES/WALIK Have you heard about the kerfuffle over at DVMoms Facebook group? If not, let me clue you in: This popular group of more than 20,000 vets has experienced mission creep since its early years as a small, upstart collective of veterinarian mothers. Popularity can do that, even in places where community support is the point. While the group no doubt continues to help vet moms seeking guidance and support, this year’s ham-fisted attempts to monetize its audience have fallen flat for some of its members. (Full disclosure: I was one of them.) Shocker: No one wants to be sold things while seeking encouragement, comfort, and community on an online platform with the sole purpose of making life as a veterinarian and a mother easier to navigate. No one wants to be sold off to product makers or drug manufacturers or to whatever random service providers whose wares might, in another venue, appeal to moms in veterinary medicine. We did not join a Facebook group for anyone’s economic pleasure. We get enough ads while dancing with the Facebook devil itself, thank you very much. The worst part? DVMoms’ was a sly, underhanded play that led to member questions over its appropriateness. In response, some members were then censored or booted off the platform for their comments. In this day and age, where transparency and authenticity are the marketeer’s sharpest tools, “DVMoms—Life In the Trenches” managed to douse its own credibility with Internet lighter fluid. It didn’t take much for the group’s justifiably offended membership to toss the match. Kudos, women! An appropriate allegory Apart from a perfect allegory for veterinary medicine in 2026, the DVMoms debacle is a cautionary tale for two veterinary industry groups: veterinarians seeking real-life interactions online (the moral: never fully trust any online group) and those who would attempt to capitalize on grassroots goodness (for shame!). If you’re going to do it, at least be honest about it. We all know money needs to be made by those who work to build things we appreciate. Tell us you’re marketing to us. Why did you have to be so creepy about it? To expound on the allegory concept, let me remind my fellow veterinarians this is no isolated incident in our industry. We’ve become so acclimated to the many ways in which we’re being monetized that we’ve achieved a collective numbness to it. Consider the nameless private equity investors who pay our salaries, the drug companies that subsidize our conferences, meals, education, and professional associations, or the veterinary service providers who consolidate so they can ratchet up fees that eat into our incomes … These represent just a few of the ways we’re “invisibly” being monetized. Which raises a natural question: Why do we let the big guys take us for a ride but speak up only when our smaller communities are affected? Is it a kind of learned helplessness we display when faced with the bigger obstacles to our success? (Probably.) More online high jinks Sadly, that’s not the only way our profession is being abused online. Have you heard about the veterinary doppelgängers selling pet supplements on the internet? When you consider our degrees confer a level of respect some others can only aspire to, it only makes sense some people (and certain enterprises) would covet our respectability so much they’d be willing to impersonate us; and so they have. As reported by VIN earlier this year, taurine and collagen nutraceuticals (among others, no doubt), are being hawked by fake veterinarians offering testimonials on the veterinarian-recommended benefits of these specific supplements.1 In the case of the taurine product, we’re told by an attractive “Dr. Brown” we should be testing for and supplementing our feline patients with taurine. (Never mind I’ve never seen a taurine test on any lab form, much less requested one.) Turns out this “Dr. Brown” is a lovely veterinarian down in Texas whose image was lifted off the internet and used without her consent. As for the vet shilling collagen? He’s reportedly an AI construct. I’ll let that tidbit digest for a minute. The future is us (a version, anyway) If you think we won’t be seeing hard-sell videos using AI impostor vets within the year, I’ll take that bet. In fact, they’re probably already making the rounds along with faux Lego character videos depicting Netanyahu cackling over the Epstein files. We’re just that interesting and useful in some industry circles, I guess. But who are we to complain that we’re being used, given our own penchant for putting forth a deliriously twisted version of ourselves for general consumption and monetary gain. Consider a certain veterinary internist whose videos do more giggling over her patients than serving up any straight talk on veterinary medicine … or the product-sponsored, influencer vets whose giddy boomeranging reels set to Swift-adjacent music depict a decidedly unrealistic, sales-y version of our profession. Now, I’m not saying all vets online are directly on the take (though most influencer-aspirants expressly endeavor to receive gifts and achieve monetization through advertisement), but whenever we’re out there “building our brands” on YouTube, TikTok or Instagram, we’re almost always selling something, whether it’s ourselves, our practices, or the wares our sponsors want us to shill for them. Then there’s the AI us No, I don’t mean Dr. Scrubs-in-glasses-the-AI-construct. It’s actually worse than that. Now that our profession has proven itself utterly unwilling to share its knowledge base online via telemedicine, who do you think is picking up the slack? Yes, that’s right: Chatbots-R-Us. Pick any old chatbot, ask it a random “my-cat-has-this-thing” question, and you’ll find a funhouse mirror version of yourself staring back at you. Granted, AI answers are only ever as good as the questions asked, but you see where I’m going with this: An infinitely more perilous version of telemedicine is right at our clients’ fingertips, and the driver of such behavior may come down to how we’ve so narrowly elected to define a VCPR. Now that the law expressly prohibits me from answering an ear-related tele-question on last week’s hot-spot patient, it’s clear we’ve regulated ourselves into a new kind of liability morass, all while throwing clients directly into the arms of their preferred chatbot. How does that help anyone involved? It’s not all bad To be clear, the internet can be a wonderful thing in the hands of our most enlightened clients, but how many of those can you count among your clientele? Probably not enough to keep your practice afloat. But I digress … yes, there are some truly excellent online resources that make my life easier and my work more productive (including several AI options). It’s also true there are veterinarians producing content just for the love of veterinary medicine and not because they’ve been culturally coerced into believing that preening with puppies is the apogee of their professional image. It’s my sincere belief that in this case, it’s the exceptions that prove the rule. We really are a kind and loving profession full of true believers, even when we’re being used to sell stuff by an industry that thinks it can keep making money off our backs. My take? Let’s just see this trend for what it is—the wider industry standing on our backs to take the financial credit for our hard work. Why can’t we start pushing back? —for once. Patty Khuly, VMD, MBA, runs a small animal practice in Miami, Fla., and is available at drpattykhuly.com. Columnist's opinions do not necessarily reflect those of Veterinary Practice News. Reference 1. https://news.vin.com/default.aspx?pid=210&Id=13083759&f5=1
